A Different Perspective Official Podcast - A Dead Loss // Easter Without Chocolate, Part 5

People talk about “the real meaning of Easter”.  OK.  So for some people, Easter’s more than chocolates, eggs, bunnies and a long weekend.  But – well, how do you react to the real meaning of Easter?

This week we've been looking at Easter which is not surprising since it’s Good Friday today. Jesus, in his last week, spent a good amount of his time encouraging his disciples, here was a man under an enormous pressure, heading to a gruesome death and yet His main concern was on encouraging those twelve men, one of whom would betray Him.

But of course on what we now celebrate as Good Friday, well, that first Good Friday was far from good at least for Jesus. Beaten, brutalised, nailed to a cross through His hands and feet, He suffered incredibly and died. I don't quite know who came up with the name Good Friday but it doesn't seem to fit, are you with me? So let me ask you here and now, a couple of thousand years on, how do you react? What does Good Friday mean to you?

Well, we celebrate Easter today, a long weekend, fluffy bunnies, Easter eggs, sweet chocolate, more chocolate and yet more chocolate. And all that stuff is great but it couldn't be further from the grim, brutal reality of that first Good Friday, could it?

Today you see so much bluster and self serving behaviour. I love to watch the news every night on the TV and you see politicians and business people talking up this and putting spin on that. I was talking to a young man, a mature Christian and in his Church, he said there are couples who are burning out through work and mortgages and demands of being involved in Church.

Marriages, he said, are falling apart. So much, when you look at it, so much is about external appearances, conforming to whatever it is in our society that people say equals success. Yet on the inside, people somehow aren't satisfied, they're not fulfilled, and they’re not happy and peaceful and looking forward to tomorrow. An Easter bunny, chocolate egg Easter is a bit like that, you may have heard me talk before about the thing that symbolises all that in my life.

Some years ago, before I became a Christian, I bought this really up market, expensive car. It was burgundy, it was a beautiful car, it had light tan leather inside, that smell of leather, it was really classy. And it had four wheel steering so you could turn it around on a pin head and it was so empty and so hollow, it was just a lump of metal and leather and so what?

I tried so hard to live this outside thing and yet I was dying on the inside and two occasions each year, Easter and Christmas, things that we celebrate on the outside, the chocolate at Easter and the presents at Christmas, the holidays, they're supposed to be fun and enjoyment and rest. And for a lot of people in the middle of those things, there's this kind of deep, distant awareness of this stuff these Christians are talking about, of Jesus. Let’s get right to the point, Jesus/Easter.